What costs humanity very dearly is doubtlessto believe that one can have done in historywith a general essence of Man, on the pretextthat it represents only a Hauptgespenst, arch-ghost, but also, what comes down to the samething at bottom to still believe, no doubt,in this capital ghost. To believe in it as do thecredulous or the dogmatic. Between the twobeliefs, as always, the way remains narrow.

Derrida, Specters of Marx 175; emphasisin original

The following is a footnote to GayatriChakravorty Spivaks Can the SubalternSpeak?, motivated by that essays appearance aspart of a chapter in her Critique of PostcolonialReason. This appearance was announced sometime ago: the editors of The Spivak Reader,Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, note thatSpivak refused the essays publication in thatcollection, in original or revised form, becauseof the importance of the revised version forher forthcoming book, An UnfashionableGrammatology , and because her revisions,although they leave her conclusions unchanged,have made the original version obsolete (TheSpivak Reader 287). The books title changedalong the way, but this note will examine thedifference made by the essays eventual re-contextualisation and revision, the way Spivakhas demonstrated an argument without necessar-ily stating it.

Spivaks revised conclusion to this essay is, Iargue, central to the Critique. Considering theexample of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, Spivak recallsBhaduris casual dismissal of her enquiries anddryly concludes that I was so unnerved by thisfailure of communication that, in the first versionof this text, I wrote, in the accents of passionatelament: the subaltern cannot speak! It was aninadvisable remark (A Critique of PostcolonialReason 308). I will argue that, inadvisable as itmay have been, this remark remains crucial,

especially in its re-contextualised appearance inthe Critique; further, that Spivaks argumentabout the subaltern particularly subalternagency is exemplary of the collision of materi-alist and post-structuralist accounts in postcolo-nial studies, and calls for a rethinking of agencywithin the latter.

spivak and the ambivalence of autobiography

Postcolonial theory has been for some time undercriticism, accused of neglecting macroeconomicanalysis, of playing dangerous identitarian politi-cal games, and of overstating the importance andextent of textuality; overall, of constituting aform of intellectual neo-colonialism. There is acertain renewed Marxist analysis underlying (andconstituting itself through) some of these criti-cisms, as in the work of Aijaz Ahmad, Neil

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MAKING AN EXAMPLEOF SPIVAK

AN GE LAK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 6 number 1 april 2001

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/010035-12 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725012005675 6

example of spivak

Lazarus, and Benita Parry. Perhaps the mostconcise example of this tendency is TerryEagletons review of A Critique of PostcolonialReason (In the Gaudy Supermarket1), whichwas the occasion for several issues discussion onthe letters page of the London Review of Books.Eagleton forcefully suggests that Spivak is exem-plary of the problems inherent in post-structural-ist materialisms, specifically those hailing fromthe United States. He argues that Spivakswriting is entirely predictable in the context ofcapitals radical mobility, and that her auto-biographical style accompanies an unwillingnessto actually perform the critique announced bythe books title.

I want to consider one aspect of this argumentagainst Spivak, seemingly generalised fromSpivak as example to postcolonial theory in itsprojected entirety the autobiographical style.What Spivak most often implies (in fact, demon-strates), but sometimes also explicitly argues, isthe opposite of what this style is taken to show:Spivak demonstrates that identitarian claims(claims to alterity) are severely problematic atbest, and dishonest on occasion. The constantclaim, recently repeated by Lazarus and byBrennan, that Spivak is at best an inconsistentMarxist, is challenged by an attention to criticalform, a mimicry of critical styles. But thismimicry is not simply mocking, and Spivak alsorepeats a certain resistance of feminist analysis toa supposedly encompassing materialism.

To think about this autobiographical style, Iwill subsequently also discuss Jacques DerridasMonolingualism of the Other, a text that arguesand demonstrates a particular logic of exemplar-ity, and that sets up an understanding of singu-larities as just what call for translation. Thisapparently more abstract level of description willhelp to demonstrate what is taking place in auto-biographical translation. Monolingualism of theOther shares with Derridas earlier Spurs:Nietzsches Styles a perhaps curious insistenceon the misunderstanding of Derridas termdissemination : in both texts there is the assertionthat, contrary to standard interpretation, dissem-ination is about singularity rather than plurality.This insistence can be related to the occasions forthese texts: Spurs considers the place of woman

in Nietzsche; Monolingualism , the status of theautobiographical instance of the colonised.They suggest two contexts to which Derrida is,despite certain claims to the contrary, more orless sensitive: womens studies and postcolonialstudies. What I will suggest is that something inthe theorisation of singularity, and in the demon-stration of autobiography, retains a sense of theprecariousness of institutional identities whilstcelebrating the potential for continued poeticreinvention. I will argue that Spivak attends tothe same set of questions, perhaps drawingslightly different conclusions, conclusionsaddressed to a particular set of institutionalcontexts, but also concerned to remember thenon-saturability of context and the always alreadybroken-ness of institutional frames.

To approach Spivaks A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason I will first consider certainrecurring themes and modes of discourse presentand prefigured in In Other Worlds. Overall, anddespite its fragmentary qualities, Spivaks work isunited by an immense coherence of argument,which extends further than the rewritings ofearlier essays that constitute much of theCritique.2 The later text may be the fullest state-ment of the argument, but Spivak has writtenconsistently above all to and about the metropol-itan (feminist) intellectual.3

I begin with the translators preface and trans-lation of Draupadi, in part to exploreEagletons charge that Spivak fails to attend tothe language of literature, but also because itthematises the concerns about autobiographicalwriting that, I am arguing, her writing alsodemonstrates and exemplifies. She writes: Whenwe speak for ourselves, we urge with conviction:the personal is also political. For the rest of theworlds women, the sense of whose personalmicrology is difficult (though not impossible) forus to acquire, we fall back on a colonialist theoryof most efficient information retrieval (Spivak,In Other Worlds 179). This argument is certainlypresent later in the Critique, concerned also withthe continued (simultaneous) invocation andforeclosure of the native informants perspectivethat occurs in such information retrieval. Here,in an allegorical reading of Devis story, Spivaksees its villain, Senanayak, as an expression of

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First World benevolence, the closest approxi-mation to the First World scholar in search of theThird World (179):

In theory, Senanayak can identify with theenemy. But pluralist aesthetes of the FirstWorld are, willy-nilly, participants in theproduction of an exploitative society. Hence inpractice, Senanayak must destroy the enemy,the menacing other. He follows the necessitiesand contingencies of what he sees as his histor-ical moment. (179; emphasis in original. Allsubsequent emphasis is original, unless indi-cated otherwise.)

Spivaks diagnosis of the causes of this breakbetween theory and practice is as follows: Theassumption of such a clean break in fact dependsupon the assumption that the individual subjectwho theorizes and practices is in full control. Atleast in the history of the Indo-European tradi-tion in general, such a sovereign subject is alsothe legal or legitimate subject, who is identicalwith his stable patronymic (185). Spivak thusexplicitly makes this discontinuity betweentheory and practice a question of the sovereignsubject, and more specifically of a certainmasculinist version of that subject. This argu-ment will be revisited in the Critique, and consis-tently Spivak will argue that there is anincreasing tendency for metropolitan women tooccupy this position, likewise valuing efficientinformation retrieval. In perhaps her mostsuccinct expression of this concern, FrenchFeminism in an International Frame, Spivaksimply writes that, the First World feministmust learn to stop feeling privileged as awoman (136). That essay also focused ondisplacing the centrality of the investigator assubject (15). So there is, then, a recurrent argu-ment about the metropolitan (female) writingsubject. But, whilst this question is thematisedand posed, another is elided, and that is the ques-tion of language, a question that will attainspecific weight when it comes to the rewriting oftheory that Spivak recommends and undertakesin much of her work, but especially in theCritique. In the context of Devis story, we mightwonder about the translation itself and theconcomitant allegorical reading. This questioningmarks the limit of thematic reading.

I will return to these questions in my discus-sion of Derridas Monolingualism, a text explic-itly concerned with the question of a poeticinvention. For the moment I will continue tracingcontinuities in Spivaks work. I have raised certainquestions about Spivaks attention to form,language, and theme; now I wish to consider intel-lectual production. Scattered Speculations on theQuestion of Value situates its discussion of valuein Marx in the context of contemporary literarycritical production, particularly the revision ofcanons. Spivaks central argument about Marx isthat value is less representation than differential,and that use-value is something of a theoreticalfiction questions of origin become questions ofprocess, a familiarly Derridean gesture. Further,Spivak recalls Marxs analogy of money and aforeign language (or perhaps the foreignness oflanguage). Here ideas always require translationinto a foreign language prior to exchange, an orig-inary difference that Spivak recalls from Saussure,a complication of both use-value and originaryaccumulation together, although clearly with use-value cast as a useful fiction of origin.

Arguing for an economic analysis of neo-colo-nialism often absent in cultural studies, Spivakalso suggests that the discourse of postmod-ernism is itself neo-colonial: the post-modern, inspite of all the cant of modernization, reproducesthe pre-modern on another scene (169).Specifically, Spivak criticises Frederic Jamesonswork on cognitive mapping in the context ofpostmodernism, a criticism that is reworked andexpanded at the opening of chapter four of theCritique, in which Spivak gives fullest expressionto the text-ile,4 textual economic cultural analysisput forward in Scattered Speculations. Mostimportantly for my discussion, Spivak elaboratesthis criticism in the context of the investigatingsubject. Spivak considers Dominick LaCaprasnotion of historiography-as-transference, whichshe argues is prone to a certain primitivismcomparable to that she finds also in JuliaKristevas On Chinese Women.5 It is this distrustof broadly primitivist gestures that informsSpivaks autobiographical practice, a practicedeeply ambivalent toward the possibility of auto-biographical (personal) criticism: mimicking butnot mocking.

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Though, I am suggesting, these broad argu-ments in Spivaks work may be usefully under-stood within the context of an autobiographicalcritical practice, I should again stress Spivaksambivalence concerning this autobiography; inthe Critique she writes that: Calling the place ofthe investigator into question remains a mean-ingless piety in many recent critiques of thesovereign subject. Although I attempt to soundthe precariousness of my position throughout, Iknow such gestures can never suffice (24748).Spivak takes Jameson to task for his critique ofthe sovereign subject while there remains ageneral U.S. ideological subject (319) presentin his work. To recall Jamesons Postmodernism :

The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, nodoubt brings with it the end of thepsychopathologies of that ego what I havebeen calling the waning of affect. But it meansthe end of much more. As for expressionand feelings or emotions, the liberation, incontemporary society, from the older anomieof the centered subject may also mean notmerely a liberation from anxiety but a libera-tion from every other kind of feeling as well,since there is no longer a self present to do thefeeling. (Jameson 15)

Jameson argues that the postmodern inter-changeability of subjectivity entails dispersal ofthat subjectivity, which then requires cognitivemapping. Spivaks response to this diagnosis isto suggest that this chronology and becoming-postmodern of the subject is the latest self-consolidating gesture of the neo-colonialistcultural interpreter. She writes that: Ratherthan prove that the subject has disappeared inpostmodernism, the entire analysis hangs on thepresence of a subject in a postmodern hyper-space where it feels that old-fashioned thing: aloss of identity. The postmodern, as an inversionof the modern, repeats its discourse (Critique31920). What appears to be a rupture, albeita bad, deteriorative one, is figured bySpivak as a repetition. In her reading of thedecentred subject, the effect of centring isirreducible; as she suggests in ScatteredSpeculations, materialist and idealist predica-tions of the subject mutually implicate eachother from the start.

Beyond Spivaks scepticism about a nominallydecentred subject of late capitalism, I wouldemphasise also her related concern about thekind of discourse Jameson has produced. Spivaksuggests that Jamesons diagnosis of the latecapitalist subject also produces that subject:This apparently descriptive gesture is, alas, aperformative: the thing is done with words;culture is cultural explanation; to say everythingis cultural is to make everything merely cultural(334). In the context of Spivaks broadest argu-ment that the native informant perspective issimultaneously invoked and foreclosed thiscriticism of Jameson finds him to be not onlyincorrect but also irresponsible. In this sense,Spivaks argument bears comparison with AijazAhmads response to Jameson: Ahmads objec-tion to his production by Jameson as a ThirdWorld subject is not only that this production ishistorically and geographically dubious, but alsothat it is pressed into the service of a particularkind of self-constitution (In Theory 95122). Forher part Spivak suggests that, like most peri-odizing and culturally descriptive or explanatoryterms in the pre- and post-imperialist West, whatis not postmodern shares with the postmodern amanipulation of the geopolitical other in itsproduction (33637). This argument finds theproduction of postcolonial subjects in the metro-politan university to be at least partly furthermanipulation of self-consolidating Otherness:the privileged inhabitant of neo-colonial spaceis often bestowed a subject-position as geo-polit-ical other by the dominant radical (339).

The figure of Spivak herself is apparently thatprivileged inhabitant of neo-colonial space; yet towhat extent and in what ways does Spivak chal-lenge this representation of her own subject-posi-tion? Spivaks concerns about the kind of textconstituted (and produced) by JamesonsPostmodernism leads to the question of Spivaksown writing. If there is a certain mimicry ofapparently dominant modes of academicdiscourse in Spivaks writing, this mimicry is notsimply dismissive. That said, its over-literal repe-tition does produce a rupture of sorts, and istherefore, in Jamesons terms and owing to itsulterior motives (Postmodernism 17), closer toparody than to pastiche without, I would argue,

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falling prey to the kind of objection that is foundin Eagletons characterisation of postmodernistparody as the dissolution of art into the pre-vailing forms of commodity production(Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism385). I find much greater complexity in theCritiques deployment of autobiography thanEagleton allows when he dismissively suggeststhat Spivaks works rather tiresome habit ofself-theatricalising and self-alluding is the colo-nials ironic self-performance, a satirical stabas scholarly impersonality, and a familiarAmerican cult of personality (In the GaudySupermarket 6).6

We might assume from the above, and frominterventions such as Who Claims Alterity? orLives, that Spivak is wholly opposed to thekind of self-constituting autobiographical prac-tice that would claim marginality, at least to theextent that such claims to alterity, if heard, areheard within a privileged context. But this wouldnot be entirely accurate, as is evident fromSpivaks response to Benita Parry in Outside inthe Teaching Machine. This brief response ledto the exchange of various polemics on questionsof ethnic, national, and political identities, buthas perhaps not been examined for its ownmarked and hardly accidental ambivalence onthese questions. Responding to the charge madeby Parry that Spivak (with Homi Bhabha andAbdul JanMohamed) silences the native voice,7

Spivak refers back to herself: When BenitaParry takes us to task for not being able to listento the natives or to let the natives speak, sheforgets that the three of us [Spivak, Bhabha, andJanMohamed], post-colonials, are natives too.Yet on the same page, Spivak refers to the iden-titarian ethnicist claims of native or fundamentalorigin (Outside in the Teaching Machine 60;see also Critique 190) implicit in Parrys criti-cisms, contrasting these claims with politicalclaims. The two gestures, the one appealing to(auto)biographical origin and the other refusingsuch appeals, come on the same page, and appearto sit rather awkwardly, despite the quotationmarks Spivak inserts around natives (quotationmarks interestingly absent in the equivalentsection of the Critique). Spivak goes on to claimthat:

Within the historical frame of exploration,colonization, decolonization what is beingeffectively reclaimed is a series of regulativepolitical concepts, the supposedly authoritativenarrative of the production of which was writ-ten elsewhere, in the social formations ofWestern Europe. They are being reclaimed,indeed claimed, as concept-metaphors forwhich no historically adequate referent may beadvanced from postcolonial space, yet thatdoes not make the claims less important. Aconcept-metaphor without an adequate refer-ent is a catachresis. These claims for foundingcatachreses also make postcoloniality a decon-structive case. (Outside in the TeachingMachine 60)8

derrida and the language of exemplarity

It is here, at an apparent (catachrestic) impasse,both appealing to and dismissing autobiographyand identity, that I will consider Derridas writ-ings. This consideration will give a fuller sense ofwhat Spivak is arguing here, and what she isdemonstrating throughout the Critique, than isallowed by following Laura Chrismans sugges-tion that the above claim to alterity is simply aninstance of Spivaks strategic essentialism (40). Iwill now reconstruct aspects of Monolingualismof the Others argument, especially to the extentthat it might be made to communicate withSpivaks Critique. In the context of Spivaks crit-icisms of Jamesons staged confrontation betweenMarxism and deconstruction, I will also considerhow the arguments of Monolingualism relate toSpecters of Marx.

As I have already indicated, Monolingualism ,like Spurs, insists that dissemination and so,but with precautions, deconstruction is aboutsingularity rather than plurality. In this case,however, Derrida more directly risks his ownsingularity in a kind of autobiographical textthat refers to his own colonial childhood inAlgeria. Beginning with these early Algerianexperiences (of languages, religions, French-ness), the texts themes and demonstrations comedown to the following: that the enigmatic butapparently autobiographical statement I haveonly one language, yet it is not mine is also

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generalisable (1).9 On the one hand, the textelaborates what such a statement might mean,addressing accusations of performative contradic-tion; on the other hand, Derrida argues for theessential coloniality of culture, bearing thereforeon questions of postcolonialism.

Derrida pushes reflection on testimony intomore general elaboration of the logic of exem-plarity. The unique is attested to in a universallanguage, and this universal structure is morevividly (20) readable because of exemplarity.Derrida further wants to argue for the exemplar-ity of the Colonial in this context: All culture isoriginarily colonial (39). Now whilst Derridainsists immediately that this should not be takento efface the specificity of colonialisms, thisgeneralisation of the Colonial appears to risk alevelling of difference intuitively unacceptable topostcolonial studies. It remains to be demon-strated that Derridas thought of exemplarity incommunication with the specificity of this auto-biographical example in other words, the strate-gic calculation Derrida has made works to givedifference a chance generally, for instance inmulticulturalist discourses.

Monolingualism is, then, autobiographical ,yet this intervention into the practice of multi-culturalist or postcolonial discourse, like SpivaksCritique, is ambivalent about the autobiographi-cal urge.10 I have considered the autobio-graphical emphasis of Spivaks work, andMonolingualism operates in a similar spacein which the risking of singularity is alwaysalready underway; that Derrida should be anexaggerator he more or less exaggeratedlyclaims: I always exaggerate (48) accompaniesa certain over-literal mimicry of claims to alterity(I venture to present myself to you here, eccehomo, in parody, as the exemplary Franco-Maghrebian (19)). Such exaggeration andmimicry are bound up in, but also serve parodi-cally to split, this consideration of autobiographyas a mode.

This autobiography is concerned to makecertain claims about the simultaneous impossibil-ity and possibility of autobiography. Such aformulation appears straightforwardly contradic-tory, but conveys the circumspection of an argu-ment that might otherwise seem reductive, both

of autobiography generally (presenting it asincomplete philosophy or science) and of differ-ent autobiographies (almost converted into anundifferentiated stream). Derrida suggeststoward the close that Monolingualism is anaccount of what will have placed an obstacle inthe way of this auto-exposition for me (70). Or,again, a little later: A Judeo-Franco-Maghrebiangenealogy does not clarify everything, far from it.But could I explain anything without it, ever?(7172). To return to the possibility and impos-sibility of autobiography, this last quotationshould not be taken to imply that autobiographycan only ever offer partial explanation, if that istaken to imply the subsequent assumption ofinterpretations burden by a philosophy purgedof such contingency. This latter conceptionwould allow for the necessary contingency ofphilosophys genesis, with the philosophicalstructure supervening at a moment to beassigned, whereas Derrida is concerned to arguefor co-implication of contingency and necessity atthe origin the prosthesis of origin of the textssubtitle.

This prosthesis patterns Derridas work fromits earliest stages, and has been taken to be insome sense a necessary corrective to myths oforigin of various kinds. On this construal,deconstruction is taken to have an implacablesuspicion of essentialisms, origins, and so on.While this is not a misreading per se, it is,however, a partial reading. Assuming as it does aneglect in Derridas work of socio-political real-ity, a response that cautiously defends nation-alisms, for instance, points out that essentialismsfunction in circumscribable and beneficial waysin specific contexts. Derrida would, according tothis reading, elide differences in search of aprojected generalisable neutrality of philosophy.However, Derridas work in fact suggests that inthe case of certain nicknames like the colo-nial or the feminine, what is needed is thepatient, laborious, perhaps boring, establishmentand preservation of a concomitant institution.Not all not any of these names function in thesame way, and they all have specificities to berespected, even if such respect is alreadytempered by appropriation. In Monolingualism ,Derrida advances a more striking claim: that

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accompanying the im-propriety of each monolin-guals relation to his or her language is a law thatthe originary language must be invented, withfurther implication that this is, in some sense,desirable or beneficial. This suggestion marks nosudden conversion, as is also indicated byDerridas insistence on singularity elsewhere.

Derridas text approaches the question ofsingularity through the autobiographical exem-plarity that I have already discussed. Derridarefers to the perhaps commonplace recognitionthat rigid distinctions of idiom, dialect, andlanguage quickly become untenable withincreased detail of description. But such externaldescriptive criteria ought to retain the mark oftheir provisional nature; Derrida focuses ratheron that which actively crosses or blurs thedescriptive boundaries and here, with his invo-cation in this context of creolisation,11 we areagain reminded of the extra-descriptive forceof such boundaries. Derrida approaches thisblurring through the most purely disordered ofexamples: he himself as the most pure of Franco-Maghrebians. The specificity of the Franco-Maghrebian context here is patiently outlined,putting forward a general precariousness of citi-zenship and identity: Derrida sketches thechoice of languages at school, the solelyFrench oppression, and more generally therelation to metropolitan France. This France Paris is the otherness via which Franco-Maghrebian identity must journey. Such circuitsof alterity are specific and only generalisable withprecautions. French metropolitan French isthe forbidding-forbidden language that mustbe to be appropriated, and must be to beconstructed. Within the problem of ones mothertongue, a question continually posed withinour political culture, there is the possibility ofsituating constructing oneself in relation tothat tongue in an explicitly uneasy, dislocatedmanner. In Derrida, this situating would be thattorsional and tense syntactic form of argumentabove the lexemic or sentence level.12 This is aprivilege, but perhaps what is important aboutprivilege is not its existence, but its use. Derridasurrenders to an impure purity that is his (andothers) privilege: [to] speak in good French, inpure French, even at the moment of challenging

in a million ways everything that is allied to it(49).

Derrida here puts in place all possible precau-tions guarding against generalisation withoutrespect, whilst simultaneously demonstrating inthis other scene of demonstration (6) thatsingularity is always from the start on its way tototalisation, always created by the law, likeDerridas French. So, the claim that there is orig-inary alienation is also the claim that this alien-ation is within the language of the master as wellas that of the colonised, but there is no sense inwhich this of itself disallows its further explo-ration, or of itself constitutes resistance. So, inthis context, the circuit of reference via alterity isspecifiable to, for instance, the colonial school-teacher, referring always elsewhere. The colo-nial impulse (40) is ultimately the recitation ofthe law as if it were autonomous rather thanheteronomous; but each time, the law of lawproduces singularity anew, always to be trans-lated.

If there is something specific about thedemonstration of this argument that is formalis-able, it is in Derridas incineration of philoso-phy and literature, and French, his intention tomake something happen in this language (51).In his autobiographical sketch, Derrida remarkson the institution of French literature, andFrench literature as something not quite institu-tional. If entrance into French literature isguaranteed by losing ones accent, he has notquite lost his, and so is not quite within adouble non-belonging, then. But this is not quitea straightforward celebration of such non-belong-ing (playing the card of the exile, perhaps) ordisavowal of privilege. Derridas I is the lastdefender (that exaggeration again) of French,even against himself, forcing the language thento speak itself by itself, in another way, in hislanguage (51). Yet this defence would not quitebe merely the confirmation of that privilege, itscosy continuation at the expense of its excludedother as has been indicated, in confirmationthere is a general circuit via the other. Derridacalculates this structure, which is a structure oftranslation, as a virtue, and in this particularcontext suggests that, One would have toconstruct oneself, one would have to be able to

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invent oneself without a model and without anassured addressee (55). The exemplary situationof the Franco-Maghrebian is of being throwninto absolute translation; the monolingualdeprived of his or her own language has onlytarget languages events without arrival from which is derived the desire for an absolutelyoriginary language (61). Whilst this language isa future language, a promised sentence (62) ofthe other, it is, despite formal equivalence, notnecessarily of the master; however, the undecid-ability remains in a structure of radical opennessfamiliar to readers of Derrida. There is a neces-sary possibility that such a future languagealways might be the language of the master; thatis the possibility of it being otherwise.

In other terms, the miracle of translation(72) is necessarily inscribed with the possibilityof its failure. Such a formulation can help workthrough arguments about incommensurability asthe degree zero of intercultural contact, a moveagain pertinent to multiculturalist debate.Derrida puts forward the patient and laboriouswork of translation, implying the precariousnessof that translation, but also staging the opennessthat gives it its chance: the messianicity withoutmessianism that is structural opening, as elabo-rated generally in Specters of Marx. Idioms arealways undergoing invention without end, aswitnessed and demonstrated by the exaggeratedcall Derrida sends out to addressees who alwaysmight not exist, always might not receive it, or infact are produced by it:

Compatriots of every country, translator-poets,rebel against patriotism! Do you hear me! Eachtime I write a word, a word that I love and loveto write; in the time of this word, at the instantof a single syllable, the song of this newInternational awakens in me. I never resist it,I am in the street at its call, even if, appar-ently, I have been working silently since dawnat my table. (Monolingualism 57)

There is a clear anticlimax, almost bathos,at work in this passage, perhaps in Mono-lingualism generally, that operates to deflate theassertion of credentials, especially in institu-tional terms, but also in linguistic, or even liter-ary, terms. Yet still this demonstration ofweaving some veil from the wrong side (70)

constitutes a political event, is a demonstration ,a street scene without a theater, yet a scene allthe same (72). At least, Derrida continues, italways might have been, the uncertaintyacknowledged, the risk run.

With its minimal content, indeed in that it isform more than content, this new Internationalhas itself been received with hostility, as if itsopposition to prescribing institutions constitutedan opposition to all organisation imaginable.Reviewing Specters of Marx, Terry Eagletonrefers to Marxism without Marxism, whileSpivak calls Derridas new International preten-tious and feeble (Critique 383) preciselybecause of the seeming obscurity and enclosureentailed by the insistence on pure form.13

Spivaks question is: do not the precautions of aresolutely and generally anti-futurologicalprogramme a programme that would, in otherwords, not be a programme at all lead to paral-ysis or to institutional self-regard? Spivak gener-alises this lack of content to institutional culturalstudies,14 finding this discomforting chance ofdeconstruction everywhere we might haveassumed it would not be. This is the reading sheexpands upon in the Critique, in which liberalmulticulturalism is seen as a public relationsexercise for global financialisation: The generalideology of global development is racist pater-nalism (and alas, increasingly, sororalism); itsgeneral economics capital-intensive investment;its broad politics the silencing of resistance andof the subaltern as the rhetoric of their protest isconstantly appropriated (373).

Derridas insistence on radical openness isdiscomforting, as it emphasises that the chanceof just such a critique is also the chance of itsobject; that, for instance, Marxs text did not justaccidentally albeit not necessarily, either leadto various totalitarianisms. In the terms ofMonolingualism , the future language alwayscould be that of the master as much as it couldbe that of the oppressed the poetic idiom to-come always might be the idiom of oppression.As Derrida suggests in Specters of Marx,deconstruction has never been Marxist, nomore than it has ever been non-Marxist,although it has remained faithful to a certainspirit of Marxism, to at least one of its spirits for,

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and this can never be repeated too often, there ismore than one of them and they are heteroge-neous (75). Just so is France spectral, andDerrida remains faithful to a spirit of France(a place of fantasy (Monolingualism 42)), anda spirit of French.

To redescribe this necessary possibility: thereis a doubleness, even a duplicity, to the conceptof the example. And in this context, Derridapresents himself, on the one hand, as exemplaryin the sense of the very best example, indeedmore than an example, a model; and, on theother hand, as no more than one example amongothers, exemplary of this disruptive question oflanguage but no more so than other possibleexamples. This doubled structure, inhabiting asit does Derridas work generally, appears to takethis particular example beyond mere expedi-ency, perhaps suggesting that it is intuitivelymost possible to put oneself forward as exem-plary. But this structure of exemplarity, trans-lating a historical strategy, inevitably suggests acertain stance toward the questions of rights andcredentials as they present themselves in post-colonial studies. Still, one can imagine princi-pled objection to the strategy justifying the useof the term colonial, indeed an argument thatthis structure of exemplarity should not alwaysbe risked, by every term, in every imaginablecontext. Just as the question of risking essence isproblematic for feminism, or for womens stud-ies, so it is not clear that the structure of refer-ence that enables the term colonial to functionat all is yet ready to be faced in more classicalpractical terms. Although in principle thesestructures are precisely not in themselves aboutto level differences, to suggest that we take, forinstance, the example of Derrida as exemplary ofevery possible instance of the colonial, it isclear that such levelling might conceivablyoccur.

The danger of this levelling is Spivaksconcern (although she does not in fact make thiscriticism of Derrida15). The Critique ofPostcolonial Reason constantly identifies theworkings of a chromatism in institutionaltransnational cultural studies, and materialistfeminism is reintroduced against racist sororal-ism to stage the deceptiveness of such analysis.

Yet this chromatism always might have arisen,conditioned in the same way as the possibility ofSpivaks analysis itself. Any impatience onSpivaks part concerning this reiteration inDerrida is, I would argue, in the spirit ofDerrida, and written into Derridas account. Forinstance, returning one more time to the exam-ple of examples, this time the example of Marx,Derrida writes:

An example always carries beyond itself: itthereby opens up a testamentary dimension.The example is first of all for others, andbeyond the self. Sometimes, perhaps always,whoever gives the example is not equal to theexample he gives, even if he does everythingto follow it in advance, to learn how to live,as we were saying, imperfect example of theexample he gives which he gives by givingthen what he has not and what he is not. Forthis reason, the example thus disjoined sepa-rates enough from itself or from whoever givesit so as to be no longer or not yet example foritself. (Specters of Marx 34)

We do not need, as he remarks of Marx momentslater, Derridas authority to make the same claimof Derrida. Over-literal reproduction evenmimicry of Derridas lesson is not only notin the spirit of (a certain) Derrida, but is almostdiscouraged in favour of the hyperbolic. I canhere return to the question of Spivaks attentionto language, and her transformation of modesof academic discourse, which is not quitethe same as Derridas own performance inhis language, his persistent invention ofnew idioms. But just as the term poeticstands rather uncertainly in Derridas Mono-lingualism, so the reader of Spivak is left towonder at the occasional short-hand referencesin the Critique to literatures singularity. But ifthis uncertainty is uncertainty, that might notindicate deficiency in the arguments of Derridaand Spivak, for, as I have suggested, the literaryor the poetic is not of itself beneficial or revolu-tionary. And, as is evident from their sharedconcern with the necessary and ongoing inven-tion of identity, particularly for certain national,social, and political groupings, Derrida andSpivak look toward a future that will neverarrive, not finally or knowably. This structural

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openness is written into their auto-expositions,staging as they do the limits of exposition. As Ihave already indicated in Derridas case, on adeliberately denuded level he suggests thatMonolingualism is an account of why he willnever be able to write an autobiography.Spivaks Critique, similarly, is structured by acertain self-displacement implied by its subtitle(Toward a History of the Vanishing Present),which suggests almost that the text constitutes ahistory of a vanishing Spivak, absent not only toher readers, but also to herself. Moreover, writ-ten into Spivaks account is the displaced pres-ence of her readers, a displacement effected bythe text, meaning that we cannot take the finalspecification of the books implied readership(the university-educated daughters of the disen-franchised diasporic subject?) as final at all. Inmaking an example of herself, Spivak, likeDerrida (pace Irene Harveys critique to thecontrary), tests our general sense of exemplarity,of what makes a good political example, andaccordingly tests our sense of what makes a goodpolitical intervention.

I have suggested that Spivak and Derrida bothfind a constitutive insufficiency in a specific formof auto-exposition. Spivak specifies a context thatremains implicit in Derridas account, namingthe liberal multiculturalist metropolitan acad-emy as the new mainstream (Critique 309). Itmay be too simplistic to suggest that there is anaffectation of subalternity at work in this metro-politan context, and yet Spivak maintains thatthe affectation of an embattled marginal chroma-tism is exactly what betrays the supposed empow-erment conferred by (post-)subaltern affect. Thewaning of affect that Jameson finds particularto postmodernism is apparently resisted bymetropolitan materialist discourses, discoursesthat insist on the limitations of postmodern diag-noses, their specificity to a certain context. Yeteven as subaltern consciousness is allowed tospeak against this previously generalised post-modern subjectivity, this allowing to speakbegins to look like a putting forward that effacesits own context and effects. This situation callsfor an apparitional understanding of subalternityand its study, comparable to, but clearly not

reducible to, the study oftextual effects beyond thepropositional; with all dueprecautions, even a syntax ofsubalternity.

notes

I am grateful to Jon Beasley-Murray, GeoffreyBennington, and Bart Moore-Gilbert for theircomments.

1 The title refers us to Spivaks Subaltern Studies:Deconstructing Historiography, where shewrites that, Since one cannot accuse this group ofthe eclecticism of the supermarket consumer, onemust see in their practice a repetition of as well asrupture from the colonial predicament: the trans-actional quality of inter-conflicting metropolitansources often eludes the (post)colonial intellec-tual (In Other Worlds 202).

2 Hence I disagree with Inness identification ofradical departures in the Critique.

3 Shadowing Spivaks argument that we must learnto see ourselves as others would see us, and imag-ining Aijaz Ahmads response to that argument,Lyn Innes suggests that, Ahmad would no doubtreply that we have been all too prone to seeourselves as others would see us (68); I cannotmake much sense of this presumed response, aresponse that appears to talk past Spivaks argu-ment, but the rest of this discussion will attemptto address its apparent criticism.

4 In The Illusion of a Future, Brennan suggeststhat, the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [inthe 1980s] was a mixture of Derrida and a textu-alized Marx although this may only be a way ofsaying a Derridean Marx (567). ScatteredSpeculations represents Spivaks most conciseand explicit thematic justification of this textuali-sation, which appears to be a way of finding Marxeverywhere, always where he ought not to be.Spivak wants to undo the binary oppositionbetween the economic and the cultural (166).

5 In French Feminism in an International Frame,Spivak writes: Reflecting a broader Westerncultural practice, the classical East is studied withprimitivistic reverence, even as the contempo-rary East is treated with real political contempt(In Other Worlds 138).

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6 The rather loose play with irony might berelated to the debate between Laura Chrismanand Robert Young occasioned by Youngs reviewof Spivaks Outside in the Teaching Machine; seeChrisman, Questioning Robert Youngs Post-Colonial Criticism, and Young, Response toLaura Chrisman.

7 Here the issue of whether or not Can theSubaltern Speak? means that not allow[ing] resis-tance to speak becomes precisely the issue (TheSpivak Reader 287).

8 Here we should recall also the section onJameson in the Critique, where Spivak suggests thatthe individuals sense of the subject iscatachrestic . Aijaz Ahmad takes issue with thenotion of catachrestic postcolonial identity in hisThe Politics of Literary Postcoloniality. For asimple explanation of Spivaks (unorthodox) use ofcatachresis in this specific sense, see herTranslation as Culture.

9 In quotation marks in the original, as perhaps areference to its testimonial and dialogical frame.

10 Derrida makes an early dismissive reference to,playing the card of the exile (5), a dismissalwhich would clearly not be straightforwardlygeneralisable.

11 The book opens with an epigraph taken fromEdouard Glissant referring to the anti-humanismof the revision of le domesticage par la languefranaise.

12 On the lexemic and syntactic in Derridas writ-ing, see Marian Hobson, Jacques Derrida: OpeningLines.

13 Monolingualism puts into play the possibility thatthis evacuation of content in messianicity might bea demand of messianism, in which case the purityof this form would already from the beginninghave been compromised (68).

14 Reading McLuhan and Lyotard, Spivak suggeststhat they provide the narrative of development(globalization)democratization (U.S. mission) analibi (371). Aijaz Ahmad wishes that Derrida hadconsidered this issue in Specters of Marx; seeAhmads Reconciling Derrida, in SprinkersGhostly Demarcations.

15 She comments on abyssal structures of descrip-tion, autobiography, and so on towards the closeof the Critique, redeploying the textual/textilemetaphor: It must be acknowledged that Derrida

attempted such a stitching in Glas, in the interestof a critique of phallogocentrism. But that, too, isonly European-focus. His attempts at interveningin globality (Specters) or at speaking for (from?)Algeria or as Franco-Maghrebian must remain onanother register (421). Monolingualism mightsuggest otherwise, and demonstrate certain prob-lems with the for/from division.

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David HuddartFaculty of Policy StudiesChuo University742-1 HigashinakanoHachioji-shiTokyo 192-0393Japan